S3 Battery Drain Thread - 1) False Cell Standby report 2) Standby Drain

[pinu12345]

hey john,
i am from connecticut-usa at&t user.
i was having the same issue as the title of this thread said.
in my house i and my two brothers have baught total of 3 galaxy s3.
out of those three mine happend to be showing these problems, and not the other two phone.
i really want to thank you and also congratulate you on cracking the root of the problem. that was really hard work.
yr post #170 worked great for me.
but some times i still fear that i am going to have same issue with the phone again. so i was kind of thinking to get a replacement device also, as costco let u exchange it for the new one withing 90 days here.
what u think about it?
i had used yr advice to disable all those samsung apps/processes, it has been 5 days and i dont think i had issue.
everynight i listen to this 30 min song before i go to bed, which is stored on my phone. in my last 5 nights i played that song on my s3 and rest four night i didnt. but on that night when i played the phone went from 50 % at night to dead bettry when i wakeup in the morning. but i am 100% sure i did ended that process in the task manager.
any idea what can be issue.
i plan to check tonight and play that on S3 and test it.
once again thanks for all yr help
-Pinesh

 

[dfree86]

Hey guys,

I've had my galaxy s3 for a couple of months now. I've only been experiencing the battery issue for a couple of weeks now and some days it's better than others. In all cases, the issues seem to be with Cell Standby. But today was the definite nadir.

I took it off the charge at 6 AM and it was dead by 4.00 PM. The only features i had enabled were mobile data, power saving, and screen rotation all day. The phone was in my pocket all day while I was teaching and I literally did not illuminate the screen one time. That's 10 hours of standby and then dead. A check of the battery usage revealed more than 50 percent drained by cell standby. I live in the nyc metro area and use at&t. Unless something like Facebook or twitter is some drawing insane amount of power, this is a pretty heavy defect, right?

Am I right that there's an issue with both the reporting of the cell standby usage and the usage itself? Has there been any update on fixing this issue?

I've read this thread and many others but no one seems to have a true sense of what's going on. What would you guys as given the severity of my issue?

Thanks for any help - I'm an iPhone convert and love the s3 and every capacity so far except this one. Cheers!

 

[PGP_Protector]

Looked up this thread due to a weird issue I had today (May of been a fluke)
Had a full charge this morning, working from home and made one short call.
Then my phone beeps saying low battery ???
Don't have BBS installed, but I do have Juice Defender installed.

Now I did see that AllShare used 4 Gig today alone
Though I wasn't viewing any images, listing to music or playing any vids, so I don't know why that app went all hog wild.

 

[XOS THW]

I have a whole other drainer, same as the guy above.
My android system has suddenly been sucking down my battery this week - 47% already today.
I have barely used the phone today and I even restarted it.

 

[rcsrich]

Looked up this thread due to a weird issue I had today (May of been a fluke)
Had a full charge this morning, working from home and made one short call.
Then my phone beeps saying low battery ???
Don't have BBS installed, but I do have Juice Defender installed.

Now I did see that AllShare used 4 Gig today alone
Though I wasn't viewing any images, listing to music or playing any vids, so I don't know why that app went all hog wild.

Yowsa- hope that 4 GB was on wifi!!!

 

[SaurabhHanda]

Since I see a few recent posts on this I will also put in my 2 cents. After turning the Samsung App off (Post #121) everything was going okay and then one day I noticed that while at my desk at work all of a sudden I was losing 8-10% an hour, restarted many times over a few days to no avail. Then I started wondering if there was something wrong with my work WiFi and was switching to 4G LTE for some reason, so I used this post -- http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1766516 -- Post #2 and switched my phone to 3G (well it is Edge on Rogers) and that fixed my problem. Of course since the IT person at work restarted the router and it was not a problem for me anymore but I have kept it on 3G because now even with regular usage I get almost 2 days out of each charge, basically have to charge it the 2nd day before bed.

 

[Fred G. Vader]

On Nov. 20th I switched over from the Galaxy Note to the GS3. From the 20th to the 27th the battery life was absolutely awesome! Yesterday (Nov. 27th) the phone had been off the charger since 5 AM and I went to bed at 10:30 PM and had 39% remaining! I remarked to my gf yet again about how great the battery life was.

Then today I noticed that my battery was draining much faster than it normally does even though I had barely used it (was just sitting on my desk). Went into Settings --> Battery and sure enough Cell Stand-by was draining the battery like crazy - even more than Screen On time.

I did notice that the GPS active icon was displaying in the status bar so I disabled all GPS related settings (Use VZW Location Services and Use Google Location Services had become checked somehow). The GPS inactive icon now permanently displays in the status bar but I don't think it was always present before today so I'm wondering if that has something to do with it.

Also I noticed just yesterday that in my camera gallery I all of a sudden saw an album that said Kies:wifi - don't know why that is present but suspect its playing a roll in all of this.

I'm gonna try John's suggestion of disabling the Samsung apps and see if that works. I really hope Samsung provides a bug fix for this because it is obviously a software issue and it is truly a shame to see such a great product marred by such a horrible issue.

 

[blenkows]

So I had that bad standby drain to the point where if it was full going to bed, it would be 0% to 10% in the morning when I woke up. Literally did EVERY possible solution, power saving mode, toggling data, wifi off, turned off all location settings, facebook refresh interval to never, screen as dark as it could go, etc... Every single solution, I did and I STILL had the issue.

Well, I went ahead and rooted my phone and installed CM10 with Jelly Bean 4.1.2. That problem is gone. I don't know what that did, but I now lose like 2% an hour in standby mode. So I recommend everyone give this a shot lol

 

[poopsie]

This thread was really helpful in getting my S3 setup and battery life pretty good. Listed below is everything I did that seemed to help.

I am running Stock AT&T, Rooted with Titanium Backup

Chrome - Developer - Motion off

Screen AUTO set off-Turn way down

GPS - Off, all other radios on

Power Saving mode
All on except GPU

Gmail PUSH, Exchange check 1 time per hour

Unistalled Handcent and using stock Messaging app-Seems weird I know but I noticed higher battery drain when there was a pop up from Handcent

Turn off Haptic Feedback

Turn off auto updates and notifications on all apps
Facebook
Twitter
Google Reader

Titanium Backup Freeze
Airstash
Allshare stuff
AT&T message
AT&T Navigator
AVCRP services
Bluetooth test
Bubbles
ChatOn
ChocoEUkor
Flipboard
Google Reader
Helv Neue
Internet 4.0.4
Both Kies
Maps SErviceSamsung
Media Hub
NewsDaemon
SMemo-Both
S Suggest
S VOice
Samsung account, backup, Cloud, Push
SNS
Talkback
WeatherDaemon
WEathermain
Yahoo Finance and News
YPmobile

The only apps that I have running in the apps manager are:

Settings

Visual Voicemail

Adblock Plus

HelloGuest Wifi

Facebook

Dropbox

HD Widgets

Viber

Factory Mode

AT&T Software Update

Google services

All push-1 email, contact, calendar account

Exchange services

1 time per hour-Email only

Maps

Bluetooth Share

Email

Secphone

AT&T Hot spots

Synchronize

Light Flow Lite

Swype Beta

I am averaging 3% per hour with normal email, texts and calls

Hope this helps-

 

[yogi799]

I've posted here before and even made a new thread about how I solved my problems with overnight drain at the rate of 8%/hour but the thread seems to be gone (moderator deletes them?).

Anyhow... the solution I found after 3 months of tests...

WIFI MUST BE ON
ALL OTHER STUFF CAN BE ON TOO (I HAVE GPS OFF)
SYNC AND BLUETOOTH ALL ON
BATTERY SAVING OFF
SCREEN BRIGHTNESS MAX
VISUAL VOICE MAIL COMPLETELY OFF (TO AVOID CONNECTION BY LTE)

and THE KEY TO SUCCESS IS:

EACH NIGHT RESTART THE PHONE!

That's after weeks of verification tests. If I do not restart the phone, after a successful day, the memory build up will be about 1GB. Clearing unused cache does nothing to help. Restarting the phone in the evening does the magic. I charge it back up and an overnight drain is only 8-10% (1% per hour MAX).

With this solution (again almost everything is ON including full SYNC, only GPS is off) I can get... watch this..... nearly 30 hours of standby (and some use) when in WIFI zone (say at my house on a weekend). The drain is very very slow... as mentioned above, about 1%/hour in standby.

Best of luck everyone. The phone is great but that issue should be addresses by Google...

PS. Battery drain when WIFI is not available is always 5-10% / hour. LTE simply kills battery life.




..

 

[caledonia84]

Many thanks to John for your patience and persistence with this issue.

I've just got the i9300 and it went from %100 charge to 0 over night my alarm didnt even go off in the morning and I missed a the start of a tournament I was supposed to attend!.

I will try the fixes found in this thread the battery usage just now %55 cell standby

Great phone otherwise though

 

[caledonia84]

well.........2hours since %100 charge 3 short phone calls a little bit of web browsing and the rest on standby %95 big improvement, from before all from disabling the samsung apps, thanks again John

 

[Fred G. Vader]

I want to second caledonia84's thanks and gratitude to John for figuring out the solution to this problem. The recommendation of disabling the samsung apps worked for me also.

 

[caledonia84]

Just to confirm, battery now at 61% almost 9 hrs after full charge and disabling samsung apps with general moderate use.

Saved me a lot of headaches

 

[silentwitness]

i tried putting my phone into safe mode and saw a drop of 16% over an 8 hr period where as in normal mode i get a drop of about 40 to 60% on average going to try the suggestions in this thread hopefully it will solve the issues.

 

[Volt9000]

This is a fantastic thread. A huge thanks to John P and everyone else who spent time investigating this issue. I just got a GS3 a few days ago and I got really upset when I realized how poor the battery life was, especially compared to my iPhone 4. Just to give you an idea: today I ran both phones with about the same amount of usage. Both phones came off the charger around 9:30, and by 3PM, the iPhone was down to ~98% and the GS3 was down to something ~60%. This is absolutely ATROCIOUS. Both phones were in standby almost the entire time, connected to my home wifi, and I was running Easy Battery Saver on the GS3 (which turned the radios off while the screen was off, which was most of the time.)

I'd like to summarize all of our findings for the benefit of other users (as well as to confirm that I understand what's happening.)

1) Standby drain bug
In Settings > Battery, there is apparently a bug that shows "Cell standby" as consuming *much* more than it actually does. I read in another thread that apparently some Samsung software dev pulled a Michael Bolton a-la Office Space whereby they moved the decimal place over one spot, so the usage is shown as being very high. However this bug appears to be purely cosmetic, and does not actually affect the battery drain.
In my case, this value has always been at the top of the battery usage list.

2) Chrome bug
There is apparently a bug in Chrome that causes extra battery drain when a specific option is set. To fix this (other than uninstalling Chrome), run Chrome, press the menu key, Settings > Developer Tools and uncheck Enable Tilt Scrolling.
In my case, I had this enabled, so I just disabled it.

3) Samsung services
According to John P (post 70 in this thread, link here) he found a big culprit: the native Samsung apps. He force-stopped 4 Samsung apps (services?) and he found that after a week's worth of use, his battery life is fantastic. Other users in this thread have confirmed this seems to work well.
I'm going to try this tomorrow.

4) LTE consumption
According to yogi799's findings, as discussed in this thread and his own thread, LTE sucks up significantly more juice than wifi, so if your phone is on LTE it will draw more power than if it's just on wifi. The solution to this is to go into Settings > More settings > Mobile networks > Network mode and choose "GMS/HSPA (Auto mode)". This will allow your phone to use 4G, but not LTE (which I guess is 4.5G.)
In my case (and I'm sure most other people) the default is "GMS/HSPA/LTE (Auto mode)" which will allow the phone to use LTE. But I was on wifi all day, so I'm not sure if this affected me. However I changed the option as described above so we'll see.

Someone, please read through this to make sure I got everything correct, and please add on if I've missed something.

I have done the above, and I will be testing out the phone over the next few days, and report back.

 

[silentwitness]

well i tried the suggestions by John P i froze Samsung push and samsung backup services in titanium backup. I didnt have samsung appz installed i had removed it long time ago. i dont see samsung could relay anywhere. I left the phone on my bed side table at 47% and about 9 hrs later it was at 5% so that didnt work to well for me.

 

[cassatta]

This is a fantastic thread. A huge thanks to John P and everyone else who spent time investigating this issue. I just got a GS3 a few days ago and I got really upset when I realized how poor the battery life was, especially compared to my iPhone 4. Just to give you an idea: today I ran both phones with about the same amount of usage. Both phones came off the charger around 9:30, and by 3PM, the iPhone was down to ~98% and the GS3 was down to something ~60%. This is absolutely ATROCIOUS. Both phones were in standby almost the entire time, connected to my home wifi, and I was running Easy Battery Saver on the GS3 (which turned the radios off while the screen was off, which was most of the time.)

I'd like to summarize all of our findings for the benefit of other users (as well as to confirm that I understand what's happening.)

1) Standby drain bug
In Settings > Battery, there is apparently a bug that shows "Cell standby" as consuming *much* more than it actually does. I read in another thread that apparently some Samsung software dev pulled a Michael Bolton a-la Office Space whereby they moved the decimal place over one spot, so the usage is shown as being very high. However this bug appears to be purely cosmetic, and does not actually affect the battery drain.
In my case, this value has always been at the top of the battery usage list.

2) Chrome bug
There is apparently a bug in Chrome that causes extra battery drain when a specific option is set. To fix this (other than uninstalling Chrome), run Chrome, press the menu key, Settings > Developer Tools and uncheck Enable Tilt Scrolling.
In my case, I had this enabled, so I just disabled it.

3) Samsung services
According to John P (post 70 in this thread, link here) he found a big culprit: the native Samsung apps. He force-stopped 4 Samsung apps (services?) and he found that after a week's worth of use, his battery life is fantastic. Other users in this thread have confirmed this seems to work well.
I'm going to try this tomorrow.

4) LTE consumption
According to yogi799's findings, as discussed in this thread and his own thread, LTE sucks up significantly more juice than wifi, so if your phone is on LTE it will draw more power than if it's just on wifi. The solution to this is to go into Settings > More settings > Mobile networks > Network mode and choose "GMS/HSPA (Auto mode)". This will allow your phone to use 4G, but not LTE (which I guess is 4.5G.)
In my case (and I'm sure most other people) the default is "GMS/HSPA/LTE (Auto mode)" which will allow the phone to use LTE. But I was on wifi all day, so I'm not sure if this affected me. However I changed the option as described above so we'll see.

Someone, please read through this to make sure I got everything correct, and please add on if I've missed something.

I have done the above, and I will be testing out the phone over the next few days, and report back.

Very nice post! Thank you!
I have also observed that media server drain also the battery and I had a great success in forcing it to stop!

 

[Fred G. Vader]

In addition to the list below let me add that sometimes the phone just needs to be rebooted. Can't remember if it was in this thread or another one but someone else made the same recommendation. On Saturday out of nowhere I was beginning to see my battery percentages fall faster than normal.

I double-checked my samsung apps to make sure they were still disabled and they were. There was a couple of Samsung services running and don't remember if they were part of the original ones that I disabled but I went ahead and disabled them.

Then I also remembered that it had probably been over a week since the phone was rebooted. Gave it a quick reboot and the stand-by performance has been fine since then.

This is a fantastic thread. A huge thanks to John P and everyone else who spent time investigating this issue. I just got a GS3 a few days ago and I got really upset when I realized how poor the battery life was, especially compared to my iPhone 4. Just to give you an idea: today I ran both phones with about the same amount of usage. Both phones came off the charger around 9:30, and by 3PM, the iPhone was down to ~98% and the GS3 was down to something ~60%. This is absolutely ATROCIOUS. Both phones were in standby almost the entire time, connected to my home wifi, and I was running Easy Battery Saver on the GS3 (which turned the radios off while the screen was off, which was most of the time.)

I'd like to summarize all of our findings for the benefit of other users (as well as to confirm that I understand what's happening.)

1) Standby drain bug
In Settings > Battery, there is apparently a bug that shows "Cell standby" as consuming *much* more than it actually does. I read in another thread that apparently some Samsung software dev pulled a Michael Bolton a-la Office Space whereby they moved the decimal place over one spot, so the usage is shown as being very high. However this bug appears to be purely cosmetic, and does not actually affect the battery drain.
In my case, this value has always been at the top of the battery usage list.

2) Chrome bug
There is apparently a bug in Chrome that causes extra battery drain when a specific option is set. To fix this (other than uninstalling Chrome), run Chrome, press the menu key, Settings > Developer Tools and uncheck Enable Tilt Scrolling.
In my case, I had this enabled, so I just disabled it.

3) Samsung services
According to John P (post 70 in this thread, link here) he found a big culprit: the native Samsung apps. He force-stopped 4 Samsung apps (services?) and he found that after a week's worth of use, his battery life is fantastic. Other users in this thread have confirmed this seems to work well.
I'm going to try this tomorrow.

4) LTE consumption
According to yogi799's findings, as discussed in this thread and his own thread, LTE sucks up significantly more juice than wifi, so if your phone is on LTE it will draw more power than if it's just on wifi. The solution to this is to go into Settings > More settings > Mobile networks > Network mode and choose "GMS/HSPA (Auto mode)". This will allow your phone to use 4G, but not LTE (which I guess is 4.5G.)
In my case (and I'm sure most other people) the default is "GMS/HSPA/LTE (Auto mode)" which will allow the phone to use LTE. But I was on wifi all day, so I'm not sure if this affected me. However I changed the option as described above so we'll see.

Someone, please read through this to make sure I got everything correct, and please add on if I've missed something.

I have done the above, and I will be testing out the phone over the next few days, and report back.

 

[Volt9000]

GREAT NEWS!

I tried out the things I mentioned in post 141 of this thread seemed to have worked, at least after one day of testing.

Before, I had a battery drain rate of 6.6%/hour, with the phone is standby mode nearly the entire time. I've managed to improve this to 1.3%/hour with some light usage, with a minimal rate of 1%/hour. That's an improve factor of FIVE, which is a big deal! My GS3 is now performing just as well as my iPhone 4 (on which I had fantastic battery life.)

Here are the details of what I did:

1) Disabled the Tilt Scrolling feature in Chrome.

2) Changed my mobile network mode to GSM/HSPA auto, instead of the default GSM/HSPA/LTE auto. However, I should point out that my phone always seemed to be on EDGE, indicated by the little E. Strangely enough, never one time when I checked the phone did it ever go on 3G or HSDPA. Not sure why this is; it's something I'll need to investigate.

3) Disabled all Samsung apps. This was the big one, and I believe this is the most likely culprit of battery drain in standby mode. I went into Settings > Applications Manager and selected the All tab. I did a "Force stop" on the following services:

• Samsung account
• Samsung Apps
• Samsung Backup Provider
• Samsung Cloud Data Relay
• Samsung Push Service
• VVM Plus

Note that "VVM Plus" is Visual Voicemail Plus, which is a Rogers-specific service, so if you're on a different carrier you may not have this one.
After stopping all of these, I noticed after 10 minutes several came back on their own; I believe these were Samsung account, Samsung Cloud Data Relay, and Samsung Push Service. So just to be on the safe side, after force stopping them all again, I then disabled each one above by clicking the "Disable" button. This would ensure the services wouldn't start up again on their own.

I should mention that I never signed up for a Samsung account, so these junk services running in the background serve ABSOLUTELY NO PURPOSE WHATSOEVER other than to suck on your battery.

During this day of testing, the following icons in the notifications tray were ON the entire time: Wi-Fi, GPS, Screen rotation, Power saving, Notification, Bluetooth, Sync

I should also mention during this testing I had *no* battery saver application running, whereas before when I had 6.6%/hour drain, I was using Easy Battery Saver.

Tomorrow I plan to run under the same conditions, but this time re-enable LTE on my phone, to see if having the LTE antenna enabled really does have a significant effect on the battery life as some have claimed. I don't plan to re-enable the Samsung services because they're utterly useless.

I'll keep you all posted.

 

[yogi799]

Just in case any of you continue running into massive battery drain even after all of the above are met, I am confirming here that DEPENDING on your situation, a nightly restart may be required...

Here is something extremely weird:

When I am at home (wifi) on a weekend, no restart is required. Drain of 1%/hour is achieved as long as wifi's present.

When I go to work on Monday with flaky / poor wifi and cell reception (ie. the phone battles and hesitates between Edge or nothing and wifi), something hangs in the system. I have the phone plugged in so no worries generally, but when I get back home in the evening, the drain returns just like that (ie. without starting any new apps, etc), ie. about 5-6%/hour UNTIL I RESTART THE PHONE.

This has been tested and verified and I can now control my drain at any given moment, but it's very weird and while I know HOW to deal with it (with all services running which is the good news, bluetooth, sync, all apps that I need, etc) I still don't know WHY..... What messes up the OS and causes the memory "contamination" at my work is the million $ question.

 

[almantas]

Try disable all auto app update

 

[rcs1]

Sorry to bump an old thread, but John P's fix worked GREAT! I exchanged my S3 for another brand new one (faulty home button). The second S3 I received had really crappy battery life. After disabling all Samsung built in apps (as well as Google +, Google Play Books, Vtones), battery life was amazing. Before, I would lose 5% after about 15 minutes. It has been over 2 hours since unplugging from power and I have been using it HEAVILY and I'm at 90%

 

[rcs1]

Upgraded to JB yesterday. Last night, I charged my phone to 100% and unplugged it at midnight. Between 12 midnight and 8am, my battery only dropped 5% , to 95%. Amazing! I was NOT using Power Saver either.


Here is what I have disabled:

All share play
apps
google play books
google play magazines
google+
my verizon mobile
s voice
samsung account
samsung backup provider
samsung browser syncada
samsung calendar syncad
samsung cloud data relay
samsung contact sync ada
samsung push service
samsung smemo synchada
samsung syncadap
verizon tones
yahoo finance
yahoo news

Everything works great (wifi, LTE, bluetooth). No issues from disabling the above.

 

[Volt9000]

Well, it looks like my battery usage is still pretty good even after enabling LTE (see my previous post here.)

I should also mention that I figured out why my phone was always in Edge and never switched to HSPA. It's because I was fiddling around with my network selection settings and I had GSM only selected. To access this menu, you go to the phone dialer and enter *#2263# which wbill bring up the band selection menu. Choose the first option Automatic and this will ensure automatic band selection, although this will be overridden in the GS3's normal "Network mode" menu.

With LTE on, I get 2.5 to 3%/hr battery drain. Although this is not as good as my iPhone 4 (obviously) it's still pretty good. I don't have to charge more than once a day, which is what I expect.

Upgraded to JB yesterday.
[snip]

Thanks for the input, rcs1. I've tried disabling some of the services you mentioned, hopefully that will help improve battery life even further, and perhaps help some other poor soul who stumbles on this thread.